A wide range of arrowhead designs suitable for archery are commercially available. One category of arrowheads is the broadhead—a bladed arrowhead featuring multiple sharp cutting blades that are designed to greatly increase the effective cutting area of the arrowhead when it impacts a target. Broadheads are popular in the bowhunting industry, as the increased cutting radius of a broadhead results in larger entrance and exit wounds in a game animal struck by the broadhead, causing increased blood loss which kills the animal quickly and humanely, and provides a better blood trail for tracking and retrieval of the carcass.
While broadheads provide an improved cutting capability when compared to non-bladed field point or nib point arrowheads, some broadhead designs suffer from inferior aerodynamic properties in comparison with their non-bladed counterparts. The blades of the broadhead, if deployed during the flight of an arrow, can result in undesirable effects and cause the arrow to veer off course from the flight path.
Prior art broadhead designs have attempted to resolve the aerodynamic issues by retaining, at least in part, the deployable cutting blades of the broadhead within the ferrule body of the broadhead during flight. Upon impacting the target, the blades are deployed, moving outwardly from the ferrule body and exposing the sharp cutting edges of the blades once fully deployed. Such designs are known by those skilled in the art as an “expandable broadhead.”